"Happily for mankind, liberty is not, in this respect, confined to any single point of time; but lies within extremes, which afford sufficient latitude for all the variations which may be required by the various situations and circumstances of civil society."
- Federalist Paper No. 53

Gongol.com Archives: January 2019

With no changes to current policies, we're looking at a debt as big as the entire GDP in a decade. And that's just debt held by the public. Add in the intragovernmental holdings in trust funds, and we're pretty well at the 100% ratio already.
The mass delusion that we can ignore this problem without consequences is astonishing. This isn't an imaginary monster hiding under the bed.
In accounting, debt is usually the one thing that is always very, very real.

It's interesting to watch answers to questions like "What are seven books you love?" from high-profile people who are supposed to be highly knowledgeable about current events, but scrupulously non-partisan -- like Jeff Glor, anchor of the CBS Evening News. His picks include a classic on Theodore Roosevelt and a David Halberstam work. But it's almost predictable that he chose a Lincoln-centric piece first.
Picks like Glor's really tell us which are the safest parts of the American consensus. Lincoln? Extremely safe.